


We're Home At Last

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Universe, F/M, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 10:51:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13569054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: He takes another step forward, fully out of the shadow of the trees, and calls to her: "Hey Artemis. Is this the point where you turn me into a stag?""I see someone's lost his mind," Clarke says, her voice sharper than his own had been, cutting through the night air, and Bellamy scoffs and looks up, shaking his head with a half-smile contorting his lips."Artemis was a goddess," he tells her. "It was a compliment, Clarke."





	We're Home At Last

**Author's Note:**

> BFF Fill for the prompt "The King fell in love with his Queen."
> 
> This fic was also inspired by the songs 'Nightingale,' by Saves the Day (from which the title also comes; listen [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aan_v2uieKs)) and 'Love is a Blind Ambition' by Concrete Blonde (listen [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vusk3vSek5c)).

When Clarke arrives at last at the stream, the source of a light whisper of water over rocks that has guided her through ages of undergrowth, she immediately falls to her knees. She holds out both hands and sets them on top of the water, then lets them drift down beneath the surface. The current ripples and glides over her fingers. She closes her eyes. Except for the fluttering sounds of the stream, she hears nothing, and no one. 

The camp is somewhere out there in the falling dusk behind her, but it feels as distant as the Ark itself. The Ark: bursting with people, its hallways always crowded, lines forming in medical and in the cafeteria and in the market, never a free shower even on her allotted bathing days. And the camp: rowdy and lawless, fights breaking out over the food, kids hooking up in the shadow of the ship, bursts of laughter that sound like the howling of wolves. Bellamy presiding over it all.  

Like the Chancellor of Earth. 

No. She stands again, a reluctance like age come too soon gripping her knees, and shoves off her jacket, pulls off her wrist warmers, kicks off her boots. She takes off her dad's watch, and hides it safely in her pocket. After sunset the woods turn cool and she shivers, a good deep shiver that rattles the bones. 

She stares out at the trees on the opposite bank of the stream, and then up, up and up into the darkening gray of the sky and the first faint hints of distant stars and thinks, no, that's Wells, who tries so hard, who's grabbing out for normalcy like a man who is sinking. Wells, a rule follower. 

She takes off her socks and throws them roughly at the growing pile of her clothes. Her feet flinch at the first touch of soil. Tiny little rocks poke at her soles. The Earth is cool and uneven and imperfect and old, and now it is the domain of the rulebreakers, and she is one. 

Bellamy is not the chancellor because the chancellor enforces a series of rules; he upholds a structure of thin straight lines and sharp right angles. And Bellamy would rather smash it all to pieces, build a pile out of the rubble and set himself on top. No rules, no plans, no future. Just a fire blazing into a night that will never end. Just his own power and the brute force from which it derives, strewn over the flames like gasoline. 

She pulls her shirt up and over her head, slips out of her pants. Takes a deep breath of the evening air to stretch the limits of her lungs. Why should Bellamy be on her mind again, now, here, when she feels like the last human being on Earth? She stands right at the edge of the stream and dips the toes of one foot into the water, and wonders if this is what the first people in space felt like, if they shook with this sense of abandon and novelty and discovery, felt dizzy underneath this wave of terror and awe. She has felt water before but not like this. Not carefully and with deliberation, letting the moment seep through her like the water itself seeps into her skin. The hairs on the back of her neck stiffen as she imagines the eyes that may be watching her. She whispers to herself that she is safe. But even though the forest borders her on both sides, and this little spot feels close and secure, and hers, already hers and claimed by her, still the stream stretches out as far as she can see to her right and left, and the world is so much more immense even than Alpha Station was, and amid the breath-catching wonder of it there is also, in the thrill of the air on her bare limbs, an upshoot of vulnerability too.  

She submerges her whole foot in the water. At the camp, perhaps they are feasting. Perhaps Bellamy is standing at the dropship door, overseeing the madness and the mayhem and grinning, because it is his. Like this stream is hers. But she is not the Chancellor of the Stream and he is not the Chancellor of the Dropship Camp, he is more like... a king. 

Those kids, they follow him as if he were royalty. 

As she sinks her leg into the stream slowly, she feels before too long the bed of rocks and dirt over which it tumbles, and she knows it is not deep. So she strips off the last of her clothes and wades in. 

* 

Bellamy slips out of camp at sunset and walks quickly, jumping over tree roots, racing the last of the light to the horizon. He used to have these urges on the Ark, too: something crying out in him JUST GO. But because he could not flee, weighted down by his responsibilities and fenced in on all sides by the airless vacuum of space, he shoved that instinct down, all the way down with his fear and his anger and his pride. 

Now, a Pandora of his own worst instincts, he lets everything go. 

The world is vast, without boundaries, without end, and his legs take long strides, until the last of the dropship noises fall away and the quiet of the forest takes him in. He listens to the rustle and stomp of his own footsteps, the swish and sway of the branches he forces out of his way, the uneven crash of his body tripping down slopes until at last he jolts through the final once-distant boundary and into the clear. 

He sees the stream first, glinting beneath the light of a three-quarters moon. Then a moment later a splash up through its surface, enough to startle him, to send him a half-step back and— 

Clarke.  

She wipes the water from her eyes and shakes her head, so her wet hair splatters water droplets back into the stream, and then she looks up and stares at him, wide-eyed and silent and surprised. 

Bellamy is statue-still and shocked himself. Here in a break in the forest, where he expected only the quiet of the undisturbed Earth, away from the riot and flame of the campsite, a spot alone for the bubble of his own thoughts to burst, he's found her. Princess of the Sky in a private bath. 

He glances over to the bank, where her clothes are piled just beyond the water's reach. 

Or not so private, anymore. 

He takes another step forward, fully out of the shadow of the trees, and calls to her: "Hey Artemis. Is this the point where you turn me into a stag?" 

Clarke narrows her eyes at him. She floats backwards a few steps along with the current, a slow glide of movement that makes him picture her feet, tip-toeing along the streambed, sliding across the smooth surfaces of rocks, and her legs, darting through the water, and her arms, briefly flashing into view, paddling her along. He is envious. 

"I see someone's lost his mind," Clarke says, her voice sharper than his own had been, cutting through the night air, and Bellamy scoffs and looks up, shaking his head with a half-smile contorting his lips. 

"Artemis was a goddess," he tells her. "It was a compliment, Clarke." 

She bobs up—he takes in her bare shoulders and the shine of water on her skin, the length of her neck, the way the stream laps an uneven line across her chest, and his throat feels dry—then sinks down again, her chin barely resting above the water’s surface. She has pulled up her feet, he thinks; she is floating.  

And: she is beautiful. Her beauty and that of the Earth, reflections of each other, or parts of a whole. The thought unfurls in him, buoys him. But his mouth is still twisted in the same knowing smirk. 

"Are you coming in or not?" she asks. 

He's already shoving off his jacket and kicking off his boots. 

Clarke, he’s thought, when trying to force her from his thoughts, where she is always invading at all the worst times, is simply overbearing, animated by an overconfidence that borders on arrogance. At her worst, she is _imperious_. But she's subtle about it. Never any doubt in her eyes, though he can’t blame her for that, because he knows what it feels like to leave no room within yourself for second guesses. To place all bets on your instincts. To be all in on your own ruthless desire: self-preservation, survival, and then a little more, if you can manage.  

She's _him_ , but she's not flaunting it. 

She grew up with the crown. She doesn't need to prove her status to a soul. 

Sometimes she infuriates him. But she’s invited him into the water and she’s staring at him, now, like she truly is the goddess that he joked she was, or like to her he is— 

He wades into the water and then sinks down, all the way down. 

Their first night on Earth he felt the rain, heard it coming first as a crack in the sky and then felt it, a straight sheet of water from above, a rush and crackle of noise, uncountable frigid cuts to his skin, and it empowered him, emboldened him. As if he had called it down himself. As if it were _his_. To be submerged within the stream is different. He is surrounded, overcome, and his thoughts flicker; he forgets what it means to breathe. His feet catch imperfectly in the sand. He finds himself thinking that he would not mind if, tripping him up, taking the last of his balance from him, the current were to lift him and carry him away. 

When he breaks to the surface again, Clarke’s hands are on his upper arms and her eyes are wide with worry. But he takes two deep breaths, and a third, wipes droplets from his eyelashes and the tip of his nose, and a small smile starts to waver on her lips. “You okay?” she asks. 

He’s okay. 

“Yeah.”

His lungs fill with night air; it is clear and sharp, smells of dirt and bark and the tail end of dusk, and he thinks _you could be a different man, breathing this air_ , and _you won't ever own this Earth but it will own you_.  

He looks down. The water ripples in jagged patterns between them.  

"Good," Clarke answers. Her voice sounds rough and small, and her hands are still on his arms. 

He sets his on her waist, light, certain but slight, like the flicking of the water against their skin. And as he does, she steps closer, one hand grabbing harder at his bicep like she wants to leave her mark on him and the other sliding long aristocrat-fingers up the back of his neck and into his wild wet hair. He cannot look anywhere else but her eyes. Something flashes in them, something akin to the defiance and rebellion he's seen in her before, but brighter, solar flare bright and desire-sharp. 

“Good,” she whispers again. And takes in a deep breath— 

In the water, it is easy to lift her. She wraps her legs around his waist and he stumbles back; there is a half-second of uncertainty, the sole of his foot sliding over a long smooth stone; and then he finds the palm of Clarke's hand resting, unexpectedly gentle, against the side of his face. He tilts his head back to look up at her. She bends down until her forehead touches his. He listens to the swish and rush of the water around them, fighting back against their movements, disturbed by the rough uncertainty of their movements and by the held-breath pause that stretches taught until the moment when her mouth, open, meets his. Part kiss, part synchronous breathing. Her fingertips flutter against his cheek. 

Clarke angles her head to the right, and Bellamy arches up. His grasp on her almost slips but she won’t let herself fall, only wraps her arm around him with greater certainty. He closes his eyes. He feels every bit of her stream-slick skin, soft and warm, the press of her tongue against his tongue, the warning bite of her nails, and the part of him that is still angry and sharp and screaming says _an Alpha girl, sky princess—never would have looked at you a week ago_. And the other part, the part that waded into the stream still rough with ash from the campfire and dirt from the woods, then sunk beneath the surface and emerged, clear-eyed and shivering beneath the stars, thinks: _We are both creatures of the Earth_. 

* 

Whether she leaves herself behind when she comes to the stream or is more herself here than at any previous place or moment of her life, Clarke doesn't know. She is certain only that something seems to change within her as she sits on the bank, playing her bare feet through the water and waiting for Bellamy to come. She listens but hears nothing more than the chatter of the current over stones and the whip of the wind, strong tonight, through the branches of the trees at her back. 

After the first night, they decided they did not want to be a camp rumor, that the others did not need a distraction and that they would not be laid bare before them. They would keep what had happened, and what they were both certain would happen again, just between them. They would give no sign that anything had changed. 

" _Has_ anything changed?" she asked. A twig snapped sharply beneath her heel, loud enough to muffle the note of uncertainty in her voice.

Bellamy shrugged. "What hasn't changed?" he countered, and immediately she understood that, while her thoughts still lingered, blissful and headstrong, in the stream, in the moment of his teeth tugging at her bottom lip, his had already surged ahead. Back to the dropship and the new world still unfolding beneath their feet. 

To avoid arousing suspicion, they agreed to enter separately, Bellamy first. She hung back beyond the gate and watched him through one of the slits between the columns of felled trees. Watched as he was spotted, walking head down and unobtrusive, but with that long attention-grabbing stride, and then surrounded: Miller first with a report, Murphy with some commentary of his own, at least three kids with questions—through it all Bellamy nodding, square-shouldered, arms tightly crossed. 

Not the Chancellor, she thought again. The King.  

A King she'll keep her eye on. 

A King she thinks about, sometimes at night, idly, to stave off the fear that comes worst in the quiet and the false calm of the camp at rest; and sometimes in bright flashes during the day, triggered by the way his arm flexes as he takes off his jacket or by the harsh snarl of an order, snapped out too loud; but never more fiercely and more clearly than when she waits for him by the water, waits for her other self to return and for Bellamy to appear at last behind her, out of the trees. 

She shivers again. Is this cold the first sign of winter coming? 

She learned about the seasons on the Ark, but in her textbooks, they were only a dry, narrow column of words. Facts she memorized, recited, and then simply stored away. Little more than trivia.

Sometimes she feels as if her existence in space was no more than a coma-life: her mind wandered, in ways her now-conscious self can no longer understand, but her body was still. Now that she is on the ground she perceives the world with senses she never knew she had before; she sees with eyes that have never seen, hears with ears that have never heard, smells with a nose that has never smelled, tastes with a tongue that has never tasted. She experiences now at even the lightest breeze a thrill as of fire against her skin, because it has never known touch.  

When Bellamy arrives, at last, he kneels behind her, sweeps her hair over her shoulder, and presses a lingering kiss to the back of her neck. Her eyelids flutter closed. She lets out a low, uneven breath.  

“What took you so long?” 

He’s smiling. She can _feel_ it. 

“Mmm—took me a while to get away.” He kisses a line up toward her ear. She stretches her neck, her face tilted up toward the moon. “You know how it is. Now let me make it up to you.” 

* 

One night, Bellamy brings one of the orange dropship blankets with him; they spread it over the grass before they fall to their knees, undressing each other in fierce competition. 

His mind buzzes, amazed, at the new angles that their bodies find and at the parting of her lips, the wide black of her pupils in the twilight as she stares at him. His fingers thrill to follow her curves. He cannot breathe, sometimes, drowning in a new carnal knowledge of her, this ocean wave of tiny intimacies. 

Is that what an ocean would feel like, frothing cold pure water curling up over the edges of the land, over him? 

He doesn’t know, but he knows this: 

He has kissed down the column of her spine, counting her vertebrae with his tongue; bitten a crescent into her hip right above the jut of the bone; tasted the sweat that glistens in the hollow of her collarbone, despite the night chill; draped himself over her, grabbing at her body for an anchor, his uneven breath in her ear. 

They've rolled off the blanket and fucked in the dirt. He has felt stones and branches poke between his shoulder blades as above him she arches into the moonlight, eyes closed, head back; his fingers sliding loose-gripped on her hips, her hair flowing down over her shoulders, down her back. 

Now he's resting his head on her stomach. He can feel the aftershocks of her lungs as she breathes, the peculiar hard-soft terrain of her muscles and organs, the distant pulse of her heart beating. With his fingertips, he feels the gooseflesh along her arms (so cold out now, a sharp chill that freezes the sweat on their skin), and up along her chest, around one nipple, down again to her hip and then the inside of her thigh. She laughs, an involuntary giggle, and he mumbles, "Sorry," and files away the information: she is ticklish there, on the softest part of her skin. 

He wraps his arm around her waist and moves just enough to press a kiss, a lingering open-mouthed kiss, to the hollow space where the two halves of her ribcage curve apart. 

Clarke's fingers are tracing patterns against his upper arm. 

"I was wrong before," he says, because speaking is better than letting himself picture them as they must look from the outside, curled around each other, surrounded by grass and dirt, bordered by the forest and the stream. 

"Hmmm?" Her fingers pause. He wonders what distant train of thought he's interrupted. 

"I was wrong," he repeats, and pulls himself up on one elbow so he's looking down at her. 

She stares back, thoughtful and curious, then tilts her head to the side, raises her eyebrows, and says, "I already knew that. Maybe you could narrow it down." 

"Hilarious." He'd like to kiss that smirk right off her face. Instead he mirrors it. "No." He wraps his other arm around her, pulls her close so that they’re chest to chest and nose to nose. "I was wrong when I called you a princess. Watching you just now—" 

"When I was riding you?" Her voice has a teasing lilt but her gaze is fixed on his mouth and she's quiet, quiet like she fears too much disruption to the stillness. 

"Yeah. But not only then." His palm slides down the curve of her hip, down her leg.  

_When you grabbed my hair, when I saw your heel digging into the dirt, when you pulled me in for a kiss. Every time you pull me in for a kiss. Looking up at you from the space between your legs. Even the first time I saw you break up through the surface of the water. Even at the dropship sometimes, like this morning, standing in the doorway of the ship with your arms crossed and your gaze narrow, surveying everything—_

Somehow he's found himself kissing her again. She is holding on to him tightly, as if the Earth were about to swallow them whole. 

"You're not a princess," he murmurs again. An exhale of breath bumps her nose against his nose. "You're a Queen, Clarke. A fucking Queen." 

* 

She jokes to herself that he said it just to flatter or seduce, except that by then, really, what was the need? Also, the words did not sound like a contrivance, but more like a confession, ripped from the depths of him while, in the aftermath-haze of the last hour, his usual defenses were down. He sounded almost reverent. In awe of his discovery. 

She is in awe now too. It's been hard to get away for a few days now, but here they are again: he has her pressed back into the overgrown grass. Her hands are gripping tight to his shoulders and she's only beginning to regain her breath. He pulls out of her slowly, and then curls down so that his forehead rests against her chest. She licks her lips and tastes the salt of her own sweat. 

This morning she woke early and sat outside her tent, arms around her knees, watching the sunset bleed unknown bright colors across the sky. Dawn, and the changing of the Guard. Bleary gunners stumbling out of their tents, shaking themselves awake, stretching and rubbing their eyes before they sought out their posts. Bellamy was already up, standing next to the dropship door with his gun slung across his back and his boots firm-planted in the dirt. _World-weary general_ , she said to herself that time. _Older than his years. Not a sliver of softness in him_. 

No one would believe that such a man as that would be capable of this: how he kisses her one more time, sweet and soft and slow, and smiles at her as she curls in against his side. 

He has called her a queen and a goddess. How strange, those words. They are a distant hint, like a glimpse of a beautiful landscape barely visible at the end of a dark tunnel, of hidden beliefs, passions, knowledge, all within him, that she can barely understand. 

"Tell me about the goddess," she says. 

Bellamy stiffens, uncertain and confused, then laughs and asks, "What goddess?" 

"The first day you found me here. You called me something—" 

"Artemis?" 

"Yeah. What does that mean?" 

He hums, slings his arm low around her waist and she shifts, searching for the perfect spot to listen to his heartbeat and his voice, while she plays a game of picturing the look on his face. 

"You've never heard of her?" 

"No. Obviously." Old-time deities are not a unit in Earth Skills, after all. 

Maybe she sounds offended because he laughs again and kisses the top of her head. "She was a goddess,” he explains, “worshipped by the Ancient Greeks. Goddess of the hunt and the wilderness." 

The wilderness. Clarke glances up at the dark outlines of the trees, giant-tall and thick from her angle on the ground, listens to the bubble and rush of the stream at her back. A strong breeze sets her body shaking, and she tangles their legs together, seeking human warmth. What does a goddess of the wilderness do? she wonders. Protect it? Tame it? Rule over it? 

"In one of the myths," Bellamy is saying, "a hunter named Actaeon came across her bathing in the woods, and as punishment for seeing her nude, Artemis turned him into a stag, and he was hunted down and killed by his own dogs." 

Clarke always imagined that, in the woods of her home planet, there would be more animals. The noises of animals. The scurrying, rustling sounds of small creatures, the shuffling of hooves through leaves. She's seen a few. A dead panther splayed out beside their fire. A deer with two faces. 

"That's a violent story," she notes. 

Bellamy hums. He's started to card his fingers through her hair. "It is," he agrees. "A lot of the myths are violent." 

"Is that why you like them?" 

He snorts, and she can't tell if he's insulted or just feigning. "No. They're just good stories, Clarke." 

She'd like him to prove it, to tell her more. But instead, for now, she answers, "I wasn't going to kill you. Our story has a better ending." 

"It does," he answers. But he sounds uneasy. Clarke understands: soon they will have to stand up again, and get dressed, and go back to camp. Slip back inside the wall that protects the dropship site and keeps the Grounders out. And they don't know what will happen after that. They aren’t at the end of the story at all, and they don’t know if it will be a happy one or not. 

* 

Bellamy shoves his foot into his shoe and then bends to one knee to tie up the laces. Clarke is sitting on a large stone next to the stream, pulling on her socks. He watches her profile: there is a tight, pinched look about her face, her lips pursed, as she digs out a pebble from her shoe. She is not paying the least attention to him, and that is why he can put into words a feeling that has been growing up in him for days, a feeling as frightening as it is irrational, nevertheless undeniable and true. 

He stands up, puts his hands in his pockets and waits for her. 

When he's here he feels as much a part of the Earth as if he had been born of it himself: a servant of it, but also its ruler, King of the ground and the night, with Clarke, just as he'd told her, his Queen. And at first, he thought _I love this **feeling** , this powerful feeling—_

Clarke gets to her feet, brushes off her palms, and turns to him. "Ready?" 

He grabs his backpack and slings it over his shoulder, and she picks up her coat and slides her arms into the sleeves. 

"Yeah. Let's go." 

But that is not it, not all of it.  

She winds her arm through his arm as they step into the trees. 

He sees now, the rest: that he loves her. That, with a creeping inevitability, like sinking down under the water, thrilling like breaking up again through the surface and breathing deeply of the air, feeling anew the sturdy power of his lungs, he has fallen in love with her. King of the night, Queen of the current. A fated partnership, perhaps. 

One he will not break even if threatened by the weight of the world itself. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments are always appreciated and you can also find me on [tumblr](http://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> This fic has been translated into Italian [here](https://efpfanfic.net/viewstory.php?sid=3747000&i=1) by mona_chopsis_0.


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